POSTED BY SOUTH LONDON GALLERY:
Yto Barrada’s multidisciplinary practice moves between micro-histories, borderlands, resistance strategies, and Tangier — the city where she was raised and which her work keeps circling back to. This exhibition spans textile, film, sculpture, and painting, gathering new and existing works that draw on her research into colour theory, abstraction, ecological crisis, and cultural memory.
The title Thrill, Fill and Spill borrows from a gardener’s mnemonic (a memory aid) which describes: a focal plant (thriller), companions (fillers), and those that overflow (spillers). Barrada turns this popular design concept into an allegory for creative thought — anchoring, accumulating, overflowing.
Natural dyeing is central to Barrada’s practice. Her textiles are dyed with plants she grows herself at The Mothership, her artist-led eco-campus and dye garden in Tangier. Plants include cosmos, indigo, madder and each have a colonial history tangled in its roots. Their colours are records of labour, migration, appropriation. Waxes trace historic trade routes, techniques from Indonesia, North Africa and West Africa have been borrowed, reclaimed and erased. For Barrada, dye sits at the intersection of colonial commerce, women’s labour, ecological fragility, and oral transmission.
Recurring themes include disobedience, political courage, and the quiet subversion of Modernist forms. This exhibition explores borders and protective structures through works like Tangier Island Wall, a porous “sea wall” of crab traps, and Acrobatic Formations, sculptures modelled after Moroccan human pyramids. Tintin in Palestine (2025) reimagines two historic versions of the publisher Hergé’s graphic novel, Land of Black Gold, as abstract colour grids, making visible the edits and erasures that reframe history.
Barrada’s commitment to place, community, and cultural exchange is exemplified by her founding of The Mothership and The Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first art house cinema.
ABOUT YTO BARRADA
Yto Barrada is recognized for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives.
Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relationships, uncover subaltern histories, and reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalised narratives.
Informed by postcolonial thought and socio-political concerns, Barrada’s interests range from the tensions around borders, immigration, and tourism to the urban landscape, and from children’s toys to botany and palaeontology. Her practice encompasses photography, film, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and publishing, while her installations often comprise both original work and found objects.
IMAGE: Yto Barrada, Thrill, Fill and Spill, 2025. South London Gallery. Photo: Lucy Dawkins
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